Andromeda - Now we're talking.

After trying to deal with the ETX-70 tracking issues and spending hours and hours working on its drives, oiling the gears and so on, I realized that the problem was not solvable. It must be a factory defect because not being able to track more that 2 seconds on a row simply didn't make sense.

With this situation I decided to invest on my passion and go for the better mount I could afford with my current savings. I thought that the OTA of the ETX worth trying to reach its limits but the mounting needed to be improved so I went for the HEQ-5 Syntrek (without goto).

With this piece of technology on my hands I felt that now, what was trying to reach with my previous pictures could be improved exponentially. Not knowing quite well how to align and locate objects yet, I went for an easy target that I tried previously. What by that time seemed like a great achievement to me, now clearly is not big deal. Our neighbor galaxy Andromeda only that this time I was able to get exposures of 4 minutes.

I also changed the software I was using to process the images to StarTools which I saw was an intermediate step before PixInsight (and of course a lot cheaper). The stacking is performed with DeepSky Stacker.

The picture was composed by 12 subs of 4 minutes, 5 darks and 10 bias. No flats which is becoming a problem as the sensor of my DSLR is starting to show dirt.

Now, ENJOY!

 And the annotated image:

Andromeda

A new try on a DSO. This time our neighbor Andromeda. This spiral galaxy is located at approximately 2.5 million light-years in the Andromeda constellation. Also known as M31 (Messier 31) will collide with our galaxy, the Milky Way in about 3500 million years.

I'm happy with the picture taking into account the conditions it was taken. The azimutal engine of my tracking scope was broken so I had to take 160 images of 1 second exposure (ISO 3200 thus the noise) with no tracking, 20 darks and 20 bias. I wasn't counting with getting any result and amazingly not only is possible to see the dust lanes, it is also possible to see the satellite galaxies M32 (above the main galaxy) and M110 (bottom right).

Hope you like it!